2013
The Higgs Boson & the BEH Mechanism
François Englert & Peter W. Higgs
About This Prize
The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.” Their independent theoretical work in the 1960s predicted how particles acquire mass through spontaneous symmetry breaking, and the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in 2012 spectacularly confirmed their theory after nearly five decades.
François Englert
“The BEH Mechanism and Its Scalar Boson”
Peter W. Higgs
“Evading the Goldstone Theorem”
Key Concepts
- • Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking: A symmetric physical law produces an asymmetric ground state, giving rise to massive gauge bosons
- • BEH Mechanism: The Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism explains how W and Z bosons acquire mass while the photon remains massless
- • Goldstone Theorem & Its Evasion: Massless Goldstone bosons are “eaten” by gauge fields, becoming the longitudinal polarization of massive vector bosons
- • Scalar Boson Discovery at the LHC (2012): The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN confirmed the Higgs boson at ~125 GeV, validating the mechanism